


this isn't how it happens.

by humancredentials



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, don't let the diana stuff scare you, this is msr through and through
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 09:38:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9813557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humancredentials/pseuds/humancredentials
Summary: He dreams they meet by accident.





	

He dreams that they meet by accident.

He dreams that he’s married to Diana because nobody ever put a bullet through her head. His sister still got taken but she came back and he doesn’t exactly remember how, when or why, but her hair is still long and she still has crooked teeth and nothing ever really changed while she was gone anyway. Samantha is background noise, a well loved but secondary character. She doesn’t become anyone’s life purpose. He doesn’t really have one of those. Funny how his dream life without the defining tragedy is so seemingly simple. Meaningless, almost.

Boring.

But he meets her still.

The how changes every time.

* * *

 

He meets her in a coffee shop, one of those cliched places where normal people always meet and they strike up an easy conversation while waiting in line and she notices the wedding band on his hand and smirks as he flirts with her, but she talks to him anyway. Encourages him, even. And it’s wonderfully odd, seeing her flirting so blatantly because he’s never seen it before. Not towards him, not towards anyone, really. She’s a fascinating specimen and he’s drawn to her, wants to study her like evidence.

He learns that she’s a doctor, she saves lives and donates to charity and she has a dog. A big one, not a small yappy one. A real dog. She laughs easily, easier than she does in her real life with him. His jokes are just as bad here, but she’s more receptive to them. She doesn’t stop herself from showing teeth when she smiles. She says she’ll call him sometime and she laughs when she says that too, like she says it to men in coffee shops all the time but never follows through and he’s willing to bet that happens a lot.

She calls him, though.

Dream-days later his phone rings and he recognizes her voice and he can hear her smile through the phone when she says she couldn’t resist getting to know someone with a name like his.

“Fox,” she says. “How strange.”

And it sounds taboo coming out of her familiar mouth in that husky voice of hers. He’s only ever heard it once without his last name immediately following it and he put a stop to that as soon as it happened.

Fox, Fox, Fox.

He still hates it but it gives him a cheap little thrill over the phone in his dream and he questions if it might be a subconscious, silly kink of his. Having her use the forbidden word. Breaking the rule he set for her because in another life, he encourages her to break rules.

“Mulder’s fine, though, really,“ he insists. Every woman in his life that he’s ever known has called him Fox except for one. Except for this one. He wants to keep it that way.

“Mulder it is, then,” she concedes. “Mulder,” she says, more to herself than to him and she’s trying it out, seeing how it tastes. And there’s the true thrill, the one that feels like falling - the way she says those two syllables. He loves how she says his name, how she pours her heart into it as if it’s the key to everything that’ll save her one day.

Mulder it is.

She agrees to have dinner with him. He kisses her when he sees her again in his dream and he expects her to not kiss back because this is wrong but being out to dinner in the first place is a little wrong, too, And it feels good. It feels good to be bad with her, even in this alternate reality he’s dreamed of. And while they are not breaking into government facilities in the dark hours of the night or orchestrating faking his own suicide at her kitchen table, it’s exciting and dangerous to be conspiring in the shadows with her. And her tongue in his mouth is so sweet, so soft. He’s never felt anything like it, not in reality and not here and the mere presence of her has changed his life again and oh, how does she do that?

How does she do that every time? How does she turn his world upside down, knock him off balance, rearrange his heart? His fingers are numb with the ache to touch her everywhere, but settles for burying them in her hair. Her beautiful hair. It’s soft to the touch and he remembers another life when it wasn’t, when it felt like straw, dried out from chemo, when he was worried it would start to come out in clumps if he were to touch it anymore. But here, it’s vibrant and lovely and he wraps his hands in it.

He loses track of how long he stands there kissing her, unsure of what dream-time it is when he untangles his fingers from her hair and she disappears. Just gone. He doesn’t remember her leaving, doesn’t remember anything other than one minute she’s there, sweet and warm and the next, she isn’t.

He goes home to his wife before he wakes up.

* * *

 

He meets her, unmarried, in the halls of the Hoover building because that rebellious little Dana still ends up at the FBI in 1990, but she doesn’t end up in the basement.

They use her talents elsewhere. She shines and is respected and not chained to his sinking ship. She’s the same as he remembers her from year one, year two. Suits too big, heels too high, shoulders too tense. Something to prove.

She gets on an elevator with him on the thirteenth floor and she presses the number 2 and he presses the letter B and she lets out a little laugh when it lights up but it’s not _at_ him, really. She’s beautiful, even in the harsh light of the metal box they’re in and he wants to touch her because in his real life, he’s allowed to. In real life, she wouldn’t be standing on the opposite side of this elevator staring at her feet. She’d be right near him, pressed up against his arm, eyes watching his mouth as he whispers secrets to her because she’s his partner in crime, his great true love. But not here, not now.

“You shouldn’t be in the basement,” she murmurs and he didn’t even know that she knew who he was. He sometimes forgets he was once the golden boy of this establishment and people know his face. Rumours fly.

 _Yes I should_ , he wants to say. _I should be in the basement and so should you. Don’t get off on the second floor, keep riding with me all the way down, down, down, where we can try and save the world. You belong with me_ , he yells in his dream and she doesn’t hear him.

“It’s not so bad down there,“ he shrugs and she doesn’t look like she believes him but she doesn’t say anything else about it, doesn’t know him well enough to tease him and he misses that the most, he thinks. He misses making her laugh, watching as she tries not to give in to one of his juvenile comments. Misses when she’d play along, toss a wry little comment his way with a smirk.

She gives him a glance and he’s not sure if it’s admiration or pity or something else entirely, and she gets off on the second floor. He watches her until the doors close. He watches as she walks towards whatever life it is she lives without him where she’s nobody’s saviour but her own. He goes down, down, down without her to the lonely basement that’s never known what it’s like to be filled by her presence and he feels sorry for this stupid little room and for himself.

But at least he knew her for a moment in an elevator once and even then without really knowing him, she’d still believed that he deserved better than he got.

* * *

 

Sometimes it’s winter in Washington, it’s near the holidays and while it doesn’t mean anything to him in his dreams, it means everything to her because in his dreams, her Christmases are not sad. Her father is alive and proud of his daughter the doctor, she never knew an Emily whose only purpose in life was to be destroyed and she has no recollection of being shot in a haunted house on Christmas Eve.

It’s so normal, her bundled up in her oversized coat, carrying bags of presents for family members he’s never met. And it’s so normal, the way he bumps into her accidentally, her red hair sticking to her shining lips and it’s longer than he’s ever seen it. He finds it fascinating, the way it drapes over her shoulders like that.

She nearly topples over at the contact and he manages to keep her upright and it’s so stupid that she laughs. He makes a joke about how this would be a good story to tell their kids one day and she rolls her eyes but she smiles. She smiles and it’s the kind of smile he remembers from another time, in a rainy Oregon graveyard, laughing at the absurdities of life and the intense thrill they got out of figuring things out together for the very first time. He’s never heard her laugh that loud since. His dream doesn’t get it quite right, but it’s close.

She’s right in front of him and he suddenly misses her desperately, wants to cling to her. Wants to beg her to be there when he wakes up from this, with her severe haircut and her hard edges. Be the woman he knows and loves.

She looks at him like he’s crazy in that endearing way she does, searches his eyes for something but doesn’t find it so she looks away. He helps her get situated, fixes the bags that had started to slip from her grasp, wishes her a Merry Christmas and she seems to want to say something a little more profound than some well wishes for the holiday season, but even in his dreams, she is not impulsive and says what’s expected.

“You too, thank you.”

He can’t believe his imagination doesn’t come up with something more clever than this, but he also takes comfort in how absolutely mundane it is. He is aching for the simple things, the easy things, the things that just fall into place because they were meant to and she’s it.

She’s it.

* * *

 

Sometimes she sits next to him on a plane.

He isn’t sure of the destination, isn’t sure what the purpose of the trip is, but she’s in a window seat and his is next to hers. She glances at him for a moment as he sits down, piling his long legs into an all too cramped space. She watches with mild amusement as he tries to adjust himself into a somewhat comfortable position before giving up. The armrest between them is down, which it never is in real life, and that’s what’s causing most of his frustration but he doesn’t know her, so he can’t lift it.

“You weren’t meant for small spaces,“ she says, and he can’t believe that she’s the one who starts the conversation. She doesn’t do small talk, not with anybody, in the life where he knows her. She doesn’t say things just for the sake of listening to herself speak. He can’t remember the last time she actually spoke to someone other than him that she wasn’t trying to get information out of.

He smiles at her, feels his frustration wash away, even when the announcement is made that takeoff is being delayed.

“No, I guess I wasn’t. You look pretty comfortable though,” he says, glancing at all the extra leg room she has.

“One of the few perks of being below average height,“ she explains. “Though you should have seen me struggle with the overhead compartment.”

 _I would’ve helped you_ , he thinks. _I always help you_.

“We all have our battles,“ he offers and she nods, unsure how to respond and turning her attention back to the medical journal she’s reading. She’s so Scully, even in this world where she isn’t. He wants to keep her talking, knows that if he doesn’t, she won’t start up the conversation again.

“What are you reading about?” he asks, gesturing to the journal in her hands.

“Hm? Oh. Um. Abnormal paroxysmal nocturnal behaviour due to insulinoma.“

“Oh, that sounds --”

“Boring,“ she finishes for him, the corner of her mouth ticking upwards into the beginning of a smile. “I don’t like to fly,” she admits. “So I try to distract myself.“

He remembers their first flight. Turbulence, gripping the armrests, him making a wisecrack from across the aisle earning one of his very first ‘are you serious right now?’ looks from Dana Scully. He remembers countless flights since then. The first time she grabbed his hand during take off. The first time she fell asleep on his shoulder, armrest up.

“It’s stupid,” she mutters, busying herself with the pages of the book in her hands, fiddling with the corners.

“Hey, it’s not stupid. Plenty of people are afraid of flying,“ he assures her.

“I didn’t say I was _afraid_ of it, I said I didn’t _like_ it,” she clarifies and she can tell he isn’t buying it.

“Okay, so I’m afraid, but it’s mostly an irrational fear,“ she concedes and it tugs at his heart. She said that to him last year, Christmas Eve, after a lengthy rant about how silly his ghost stories are. Okay, I’m afraid, but it’s an irrational fear. He remembers fighting the urge to kiss her right then. He fights the same urge now. He loves her. He loves her ridiculous rationalizations, the rants she goes on to make herself feel better about her present situation, the big words and the long pauses and the determination in her eyes. He loves watching her give in. He _loves_ her.

“I’m Mulder,” he blurts out, offering her his hand in an awkward attempt at a handshake.

She eyes him skeptically, but takes his hand anyway. Her handshake is light, tentative, unassuming.

“Okay. I’m Dana,“ she says.

“I just thought we should know each other’s names in case this plane goes down.”

“Aren’t you funny,“ she rolls her eyes, removes her fingers from his grasp. He gives her another smile, shifts uncomfortably in his seat. His elbow knocks against the armrest and he winces, mutters a curse under his breath. She sighs, pushing his arm away, lifting the armrest up, removing the barrier between them. He settles back into his seat. She shifts closer and their thighs touch.

“Does that help?” she asks.

“Yeah, that helps.“ __

* * *

 

Sometimes he meets her because he has a child and his child is sick and somehow, she ends up being the red haired doctor who fixes his child’s heart.

He still has a wife and it’s still Diana (because nobody else would _ever_ ) and he still wears his ring and she still notices, but she fixes his child’s heart and brings him cafeteria coffee and she sits with him at a table and talks to him at three in the morning while Diana sleeps.

She’s everywhere, this version of herself. She’s in his brain and his lungs and she flows through his blood like she’s a part of him.

He picks at his styrofoam cup when it’s empty. She obsessively folds a napkin until it can’t be folded anymore and she moves on to another one. He is fascinated by her fingers, knows that if he reached over and touched them, they’d be cold because her hands always are. Sometimes they talk while he picks and she folds, sometimes they’re just silent in their nervous energy and he doesn’t ask why she’s taking the time to sit with him and she doesn’t ask why he’s not taking this time to sleep. They’ve gravitated here and it’s enough.

He calls her 'doctor’ and she furrows her brow at him, cocks her head, quirks an eyebrow. The familiarity of it causes his heart to break and he wonders if she can fix that too.

“You don’t have to call me that,” she says and he shrugs because he doesn’t know what else to call her. He can’t call her by her first name because even his dreams tell him that it sounds wrong and his tongue struggles with the weight of it and he can’t call her by her last name because then he remembers that this isn’t real, that that name belongs to another woman and she doesn’t live in this world with him. He can’t use her name when talking to this version of her in case she recognizes it and slips away. He’s desperate to speak it, misses the feeling of the word in his mouth, settles for tracing it on the table with his finger.

_s  c  u  l  l  y_

Scully, Scully, Scully, his saving grace in every universe he imagines.

* * *

 

But it slips once in awhile.

In a coffee shop or a hospital or on a snow covered sidewalk or in the Hoover building, wherever they meet, he inevitably slips and calls her by her last name and just as he fears, a flash of something appears in those baby blues and he knows he’s about to wake up. Wake up to the life where they’re clinging to each other as if they’re both drowning and taking the other down with them and trying to call it saving each other.

He’s about to wake up to an empty apartment and a bandage covering his head because they were playing around in his brain, rewiring him until all he knows is her, and she left. He told her she was his constant, his touchstone, and her watery eyes betrayed the hands which didn’t shake when they touched him and she returned the sentiment.

 _And you are mine_.

And she left.

So he dreams a different story, where she doesn’t know him only because someone sent her to him. She wasn’t handed to him on a silver platter. She doesn’t know him due to shared trauma and a suicide mission masquerading as a noble quest. She doesn’t love him just because there’s nobody else in her life, just because he’s taken everything including her heart and claimed it as his own. She doesn’t want him just because he’s the only man who touches her, just because it’s been so long since anyone’s been in her bed.

In his dreams, these things are true. She does meet him, does love him, does want him. But not because of assignments or codependency. She’s just a woman who meets a man.

In reality, he knows better. He knows that while she was given to him, she stayed because she wanted to. She loves him not simply because he’s the only one left, but because she was meant to. She was destined to meet him, somehow, and love him more than any other. Sometimes it’s just for a moment, sometimes it’s just a passing glance. But in this life, the only reality he’ll ever know, she will love him forever. This is the only life where she’s truly constant. Where she never disappears.

He’s angry that she left. Angry that she walked away from this because it got too close, too real. Angry that she will love him from a distance. He silently pleads with her to come back, wishing he still had the ability to read minds. He wants to crawl inside her beautiful brain because his is sick and hers is perfect. He wants to live where she lives, entirely in her head. He wants to go in and drag her outside to play.

And his phone rings and he knows it’s her because he doesn’t need psychic abilities to feel her.

“Mulder,“ he answers, and his voice sounds like he has rocks in his throat.

“Mulder, it’s me,” she says in the same way she always says it. As if it’s ever anyone else. _Constant_ , he thinks.

“Scully, it’s you!“ he tries to sound surprised, just for the fun of it, and he thinks he might feel her smile.

“Were you sleeping?” She’s always concerned that she’s waking him up, that she’s taking him away from something important, that she’s interrupting his life somehow with her presence. Like he doesn’t live for this, for her. Like his entire being doesn’t revolve around the fact that she exists at all.

“Just woke up a minute ago,“ he tells her and he leaves out the part where he tells her he was dreaming about her the way he always does. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just.. “ and she pauses, searching for words and this is very un-Scully because Scully always knows exactly what she’s going to say.

He doesn’t prod, doesn’t provoke. simply waits. This wasn’t her cue for him to talk.

“I was thinking of what you said to me in your hallway earlier,” she admits. She sounds like she’s about to tell him a secret. “I’m sorry I left.“

“It’s okay, you had to get back to the office. You don’t have the brain surgery excuse to play hooky,” he teases and it falls flat. He doesn’t feel her smile this time.

“I didn’t leave to go back to the office, Mulder.“

Oh.

“I left because if I didn’t, I would have kissed you.”

 _Oh_.

“You did kiss me, Scully,“ he says, giving her an out. His fingers reach up to touch the spot on his forehead still burning from her lips, even hours later.

“I would have really kissed you.”

 _Come back, Scully_. _Come back and really kiss me_ , he thinks.

“You know,” she continues, “it’s not every day a man tells me I’m the most constant thing in his life.”

“It better not be. I’m in no physical condition to be fighting other men over you,” he teases again and this time she laughs. He can see it, that laugh. The way she bows her head because she doesn’t want to be seen laughing at one of his jokes, even when she’s alone. The way she’d glance up at him afterwards if he was there, looking at him from under her lashes. That 'what am I going to do with you?’ look on her face.

 _Kiss me, Scully_.

“You know how I feel about you don’t you, Mulder?“ She sounds so unsure, as if she hasn’t proven her dedication to him in a thousand different ways and lifetimes.

“Of course, Scully. Of course I know.”

They didn’t erase the part of his memory that knows she loves him.

She doesn’t say it, though, even after all of this. Now’s not the time, not over the phone, not when he can’t look at her. It’s almost enough that he knows she wanted to kiss him. Almost. But after seven years now, he is getting tired of almost. What was once a faint longing, a somewhat distracting itch, is now an all consuming need.

“Good,“ she sounds relieved. Relieved that he knows, relieved that he doesn’t expect her to say it yet. Relieved that he knows her well enough that this is okay. “I’ll um, I’ll see you tomorrow?” As if it’s a question.

“Always, Scully.“

There are endless tomorrows where he will see her. After meeting her in many different ways, during many different times, in many different worlds, he’s ready. He feels she’s ready. They’ve finally reached the point where this is okay, where this inevitability is allowed to be acted upon, where all the pieces have fallen into place and he knows that sometime soon, he’ll kiss her.

It’s almost a new year, after all.


End file.
